All Politics is Loco

A relatively recent theory concerning American politics is Jane's Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

Of course, you have to take Jane's Law with a grain of salt. But sometimes, it seems very apt. There has been a lot of renewed attention recently concerning "Birthers" - people who believe that Barak Obama was not born in the United States. This idea first got started during the primary presidential campaign, when Hillary's people were looking into Obama's background. Continued suspicion is teased along by Obama's shifting narratives about his own past and the rather romanticized fictions in his autobiographies. These, along with points of style and the unusual history of how Obama's first book was written, have led to yet another conspiracy theory - that Bill Ayers was the ghost-writer for Dreams from My Father. UPDATE: This conspiracy is starting to look a little more believable.

"Birthers" are also motivated by the decision of the Obama camp not to release his "long form" birth certificate. But the "certification of live birth" which has been released is considered to be legal verification of his birth in Hawaii. Other than for historical reasons or to put controversies to rest, there is no legal requirement for Obama to release the more detailed birth certificate. Some people would like to make it a requirement for presidential candidates. because they are convinced that there is something terribly wrong behind the non-disclosure of this document. And as Andrew McCarthy says,

. . . The point has little to do with whether Obama was born in Hawaii. I’m quite confident that he was. The issue is: What is the true personal history of the man who has been sold to us based on nothing but his personal history? On that issue, Obama has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable source and, sadly, we can’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it. What’s wrong with saying, to a president who promised unprecedented “transparency”: Give us all the raw data and we’ll figure it out for ourselves?

But the theory that Barak Obama was born in Kenya, smuggled into the U.S. and provided with a false "certification of live birth" is pretty screwy. There's even a new "Kenyan Birth Certificate" floating around now, reminescent of the famous forged National Guard documents which were the downfall of Dan Rather.

There are other "Birthers" this political season, too - those who believe that Sarah Palin did not give birth to her son, Trig. The most prominent of these is blogger Andrew Sullivan, who now seems to have finally accepted that Sarah's daughter Bristol could not have been the mother, but still seems to think that Sarah was covering for another mysterious mother. The "Trig conspiracy" theory was reportedly first pushed by the same CNN stringer who recently "revealed" along with a few other anti-Palin bloggers that Sarah and Todd Palin are getting a divorce. The revelation was later modified to indicate that the divorce would be secret. Sarah Palin's statement seems to have taken the air out of the latest rumor, though the far less believable Trig conspiracy theory still slithers around among the Left.

And then there are the "Truthers" on both the right and the left who believe that President Bush had advance knowledge of 9/11. Rosie O'Donnell famously said that fire doesn't melt steel in explaining her theory that the Twin Towers did not collapse from the impact of the planes on 9/11 and the resultant fires. Polls indicate that the "Truthers" had more advocates when Bush was president than the "Birthers" have now. Still, the number of people who aren't confident that Barak Obama was born in the U.S. is pretty high. But maybe all conspiracy theories are not created equal.

There is evidence that Americans are becoming more polarized politically. More choices in media outlets, emotional television news coverage and dumbed-down "headline-type" coverage, along with a failure to emphasize critical thinking in education, all contribute to this polarization. And this polarization often leads to fanaticism. It's hard to reason with those who have fanatical political beliefs.

A few years ago, an Emory psychologist scanned the brains of self-described partisans. Partisans were able to notice the hypocritical statements of the opposing candidate but not the inconsistencies of their preferred candidate. Ideology, it was determined, showed effects similar to drug addiction.

The press seems to portray the "Birthers" as more kooky than the "Truthers". Mark Steyn thinks the "Birthers" could be even kookier than they are:

As for the alleged "kookiness" of birthers, a true conspiracy theorist would surely believe that Obama deliberately started the birth-certificate business in order to make it easier to dismiss his opponents as deranged.

The "Birther" controversy diverts attention from more important issues in national politics which face us today.